A Cognitive Approach To The Economy Of Netspeak

Internet, as the fourth media after the newspaper, the broadcast and the television,has a huge impact on the language used on the internet, resulting in the emergence ofnew genre of language, namely Netspeak. Netspeak is not an independent language,which arises from the development of network media. It’s a linguistic form appearingin the network situation, having the spoken and written features also attributes of theelectronic media.Along with the application and popularity of internet and the increase of netizens,Netspeak has been generally entering into people’s horizons, and penetrating intopeople’s daily life. The emergence of Netspeak, attracts more and more attention ofthe society and arouses scholars’ research interests. However, the majority of researchon Netspeak at present is focused on its linguistic form, such as the types,characteristics, styles and formations of Netspeak and the social factors of itsgeneration; while the cognitive approach to Netspeak is relatively few. As a fact, mostof Netspeak’s production is not arbitrary, but motivated. Therefore, from the angle ofcognitive linguistics and based on the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor,conceptual metonymy, categorization and recategorization, this thesis tries to exploreNetspeak’s generation and understanding, and the cognitive motivation of theeconomy of Netspeak.The internet communication pursues the efficiency and speed of informationtransfer, which determines the importance of Netspeak’s economy. Meanwhile, due tothe cognitive rule of “economy principle”, people cannot create all the newexpressions of Netspeak. In this way, the conceptual metaphor, metonymy,categorization and recategorization become effective means to help people toconstruct new concepts, which enable people to create new expressions by borrowingold words with new meanings, abbreviation, onomatopoeia, emoticons, word familiesand word-class conversion and so on, attaining the brevity and economy of Netspeak’sgeneration and understanding.There are five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter makes a briefintroduction to the background, significance and date collection of this thesis. Thesecond chapter is concerned with the Netspeak definitions, and the economy ofNetspeak, as well as the current research both home and abroad. Then there comes apresentation of the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics used in this thesis, in the third chapter. The fourth chapter, the most important part of this thesis, tries tostudy human’s cognitive ways of metaphor, metonymy and categorization reflected bythe economy of Netspeak from the cognitive viewpoint. The last chapter is theconclusion, concluding the research results, also proposes the limitations andsuggestions of this research topic.